During the past two weeks I have been trialing the NakedPhone service offering from a company called THiNAiR in New Zealand. Among their wide range of services, their NakedPhone VoIP service looks to be a great fit for a very early and undeveloped VoIP market in New Zealand.

Despite a few initial hiccups in the configuration and some issues with the upstream providers terminating calls I am pleased with the service, with a very low latency and crystal clear audio.

We will be expanding our use of THiNAiR services over the coming weeks and I will review the service in more detail as we look at their Hosted PBX services and other VoIP services.

I have neglected to update my blog over the past weeks due to an increased workload (unbelievable) and a lack of inspiration. Over the past few days I have begun piecing my blog back together and trying to rebuild the functionality that broke between eZ Publish 3 and 4.

I have a renewed interest in sharing my experiences and over the coming days I will begin to release code and examples for how I have achieved some of the functionality found here on the blog. I have quite a few more extensions and changes to make over the coming weeks which I am hoping others within the community will also find useful.

Well it has been awhile since I have updated this blog. That is mainly due to the insane amount of work Mike and I were trying to crash through before I left New Zealand on wednesday morning.

I am back in Adelaide now and it is hot.. very hot compared to Christchurch. Has been good to catch up with everyone I haven’t seen for 4 months, and Danae seems much happier that I am home.

I will add more details about eZ and Quiq developments when I get a chance, bring on Christmas.

Had an interesting evening with the great guys from Image Lab and the local Christchurch design community to celebrate the latest photographic works from Grahame Sydney’s Antarctic expeditions.

It was a good function, great food and drinks, some amazing photos of the barren antarctic landscape and an inspiring talk from Grahame.

I have had a lot of time to ponder of the past days whilst I have been in bed, semi-disconnected from the world, and one of the things I realised most is how nice it is to be disconnected. With so many distractions in the existing workforce; email, sms, phones, instant messaging and now social networking, your myspace or facebook for example, exactly how are we meant to fit in real work and social lives? Are we ever disconnected from these virtual realities and do we actually have time to sit in the park and watch people kick a ball?

Anyone involved with an agile work environment should understand the benefits of working “in the zone”, that magical place you achieve work without distractions, completely focussed on what you are are doing. I have found over the past year productivity and general concentration is much harder to attain given the almost astronomic rise in email, sms, instant messaging and social networking use.

From the view of a programmer I would love to just shut off all these devices, chow down on some junk food and get coding, but then… what if someone needs to call me? Or perhaps there is an important email waiting about a new project. That constant fear of not being connected seems to causing a lot more issues than first intended, suddenly being connected isn’t increasing productivity as well as some would have me think.

Unfortunately at this point in time I haven’t found the solution, with the demands of programming and business operations being two completely separate and ultimately different roles I will continue to experiment with and try to find solutions to achieve work more productively. For the moment it will remain “one or the other”, I am either programming or managing, not both.

Maybe you have some ideas on increasing productivity and managing concentration? I’d love to hear about it.